American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline

by Parker, Brian

  Because of Trish and the kids, dumbass, the rational part of his mind reminded him. In combat, it had been him and his team, his family was safe back home, not so this time. They were just as vulnerable to the crazy shit going down as Haskins’ wife was. The agency would come down hard on them if they found out that he was helping her escape.

  He stepped into the elevator and unconsciously glanced at the camera in the corner of the car. Maybe he and Taya had done enough already. They’d gotten Cassandra out of the city before the agency could get to her. Wasn’t that enough? Taya had disabled the tracker in his car and overridden all of the street cameras on the way to the Haskins’ house and the ones inside once he was there, so there wasn’t a digital trail of his presence, but he couldn’t do anything about the people who’d seen him drive by or the guard at the entrance who’d looked at his badge. Each one of those people were a potential informant as to how she’d been able to escape. He and Taya had done their part. The more they did for the Haskins, the greater the risk became.

  He frowned as he stepped out of the elevator and scanned in to go to the next set of elevators. There were several people in the car with him going up as the elevator seemed to stop at every floor. It was maddeningly slow.

  What if he got caught? Rogan hadn’t taken the time to think beyond his initial action. If they caught him, he’d be strapped to a chair and tortured, just like they were doing to Haskins now. He couldn’t afford to let anyone know that he was angry or upset in any way. He forced a smile over the frown he’d worn for most of the trip to and from the house.

  Caroline greeted him when he stepped through the double doors into the agency. It was perfunctory and not nearly as warm and heartfelt as usual. He didn’t know how she felt about the public murder and arrest. He would probably never know since everyone was scared to voice their opinion now. The agency had suddenly lurched from a new organization trying to do good by the nation’s citizens to a frightening enforcer of the overbearing System. The actions taken by Goodman today would forever change the face of the agency.

  Rogan wove his way back to the Team One area. Taya looked up from her workstation as he walked by. She gave one quick, simple nod that could easily be explained away as a greeting, then returned to her monitor. He understood her message. Cassandra had gotten out of the city with their help. Now it was up to her to not get picked up by the local law enforcement until he could meet up with her and figure out a place for her to hide out.

  “Hey, Plummer. What’s up?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant as he sat down at his desk.

  “Man, did you hear what happened?” Chris Plummer was a giant beast of a man. He made Haskins look small, and that was saying something since the kid was a former D-1 college linebacker. It was easy to do when he was six foot eight and about two hundred eighty pounds with naturally dark skin that made his musculature stand out.

  “Um…” He tapped at his keyboard to wake the computer up. “You mean about Haskins?”

  “Yeah. That’s some shit, right?”

  Rogan decided to be careful. He knew where Taya stood with respect to her feelings about the System, and he obviously knew where that fucking piece of shit Newman stood in his absolute loyalty to it, but he wasn’t sure about Plummer. The former cop kept his cards pretty close to the vest when it came to that sort of thing.

  “Yeah. I never would have thought that we’d be arresting an agent like that.”

  Plummer leaned forward as if doing so would keep the camera microphones from picking up his voice. “They have him down in one of the empty offices. You can hear him scream when they really get going on him.”

  Rogan looked up then. “What’s the point? What information are they trying to find out by torturing him?” It was something that had been bothering him since he’d left the Haskins’ house. He’d known of other government agencies torturing prisoners to get information when he was downrange. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But, there had always been a purpose to the torture, to the questions. The terrorist had information that he wasn’t giving up, so he’d be given some “motivation” to provide answers. What the hell did Haskins know about anything? Goodman was doing it simply to prove that she could, and that the same fate awaited anyone else who decided to defy her orders.

  “Don’t know,” Plummer responded. “I wasn’t in the office, so I don’t even know what he did. I think Taya does, but she won’t tell me. I tried to ask her, but she broke down in tears, so I left it alone. Do you know what happened?”

  Here’s where Rogan would test Plummer’s loyalty. “He refused an order to execute a seventy-four year old woman for falsely informing on her neighbors to get extra rations. It was her third offense.”

  “That’s, uh…”

  “Oh, and the execution was broadcast on live television for the entire nation to see that the CEA is not to be fucked around with.”

  “Goodman ordered that?”

  “Yup. She was standing right over there when everything went down.” He pointed to Taya’s workstation. “Said there was a directive from headquarters to make several public examples of citizens violating the law, all sentences are at the discretion of the local field office director.”

  “That’s gonna turn the population against the agency,” Plummer replied coldly. His face was a barely concealed mask of rage. “What the fuck?”

  Plummer’s phone beeped and he glanced at it, then over at Taya. Rogan followed his eyes over to the cyber specialist. Her eyebrows shot up and she grimaced. He guessed that she meant for them to shut the hell up. She must have sent him the same type of self-deleting encrypted message that she’d sent him earlier when they learned about Haskins’ arrest.

  “Hey, Plummer, this isn’t the best place to talk about this sort of thing,” Rogan whispered. “Lots of prying eyes and ears, y’know?”

  Plummer’s eyes flickered up to the nearest camera in his line of sight for the briefest moment, then back down. He nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  Rogan adjusted his posture and typed in his new 19-digit password, cursed softly when it was rejected, and tried again with more concentration. It worked this time. “These passwords are getting out of control, Taya.”

  “Sorry. We keep getting penetration testing and have to make everything more secure. The hackers want in our systems bad.”

  “I wouldn’t know why,” he grumbled. “Can’t we just trace their IP address or something and go arrest them?”

  “We’re not dealing with middle school wannabes, Rogan,” Taya replied. “These are legit hackers looking for dirt on the agency or wanting to erase files on their buddies. That sort of stuff.”

  “Well, I don’t think we need to be worried about hackers digging up dirt on us after what happened today,” Rogan grumbled.

  She didn’t reply. Yeah, she’s probably right, he thought. It was best to just shut up about the whole damn thing. He went through his email. It was almost the end of the work day so he just needed to keep it together long enough to get home. He wanted to talk things out with his wife, Trish, but he wasn’t sure how much risk doing so would put her in. He loved the woman to death, but she had a big mouth sometimes, especially when she drank. There’d been many husband-wife secrets that had slipped past those wine-tinted lips over the years.

  “Hey, Rogan.”

  He looked up to see Plummer holding a pack of cigarettes. His cigarettes from his desk. “Wanna go out for a smoke?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

  They went over to the elevator and took it up to the nineteenth floor. From there, they went around the corner and up the stairs to the roof. They had to swipe their badges to get the door to open, but once they were outside on the roof, they had some privacy. Rogan accepted his pack of smokes back from Plummer and offered him one.

  “No thanks. Don’t smoke, man.”

  “Well, you made a show of asking me if I wanted one, so you better take one for the sake of the camera.”

  The
big man relented and took a cigarette. “Just don’t inhale or you’ll end up coughing like crazy,” Rogan cautioned.

  He lit the cigarette for Plummer and handed it over. “Taya says the cameras up here don’t have speakers. The wind and highway—the birds—all of the noise would jumble up the recordings.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Rogan’s eyes narrowed. “What’s up?”

  He took a puff of the cigarette as Rogan lit his own. He coughed a little bit. “Man, I never understood how people got started with these things.”

  Plummer turned around to look out over the state capitol, which also happened to put his back to the camera. Rogan did the same, leaning down onto the ledge with his elbows. “So,” he said slowly. “You wanna talk about it?”

  “It ain’t right, man.” Rogan nodded but didn’t reply. He still wasn’t sure where Plummer’s loyalties lay. “I get that the agency is trying to establish itself, show the citizens that we aren’t going to allow ourselves to be played, but execution? That ain’t what law enforcement officers do, y’know?”

  Plummer took another drag on the cigarette and inhaled the smoke, holding it for a moment before coughing it out. “We’ll make a stress-smoker out of you yet,” Rogan joked.

  “Is that why people start?”

  “Sometimes. That’s why I started when I was on my first deployment. It was right after a firefight and this crusty old E-7 on my team gave me a cigarette to calm my nerves.” He laughed bitterly. “Guess I’m that crusty old E-7 now.”

  “Is that like a job title or something?”

  “It’s a rank. E-7 is a sergeant first class in the Army.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Plummer had never been in the military, but he was dimly aware of rank hierarchy since the APD had similar, except they stopped at sergeant before going up to a lieutenant.

  “So…” Rogan prompted. “We don’t have long. Five more minutes or so before our little smoke break will be noticed.”

  “Why are they torturing Bodhi? What do they want from him?”

  He shrugged. “A confession? Information? An apology? I don’t know, man. I’m wondering the same thing.”

  “Word is that he’s slated for execution in two days. Can you believe that? We’re going to execute a CEA agent.”

  “Yeah, I read the all-hands email,” Rogan stated. It had gone out to every Austin CEA email address stating that Haskins would be executed for disobeying a direct order to enforce the law and threatening another agent with physical harm. It didn’t go into any of the details behind the charges, though, so that explained why Plummer didn’t know what had happened.

  “Is there anything that we could do? I don’t know, like submit statements on his behalf about character of service and all that? I mean, his wife is pregnant. They’re gonna have a kid, man.”

  “I doubt it,” Rogan replied. “Goodman has gone too far at this point. Telling everyone that it’s going to happen probably closed off the appeal route—if one ever existed.”

  “Is it her? Is she the one pushing for this?”

  The conversation was getting into dangerous territory. “She’s probably following orders from higher up as well.”

  “It ain’t right,” Plummer reiterated.

  “Yeah, but what can we do?”

  “We could refuse to follow bullshit orders for starters.”

  Rogan looked hard at the man beside him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we’re cops, well, federal agents anyways. We’re supposed to be the good guys. We don’t murder suspects in cold blood. We don’t torture anybody—especially not one of our own. We don’t threaten the population. What’s going on, man?”

  “You’ve been thinking about this a lot, huh?”

  “A lot longer than just what happened today.”

  “Yeah… Me too.” There, he’d said it.

  Plummer took a look around the rooftop before saying, “The System is dirty, man.”

  “One thing at a time,” Rogan cautioned. “What do you think we should do about Haskins?”

  “Like, what, break him out or something?”

  “Or something,” Rogan agreed.

  “Hey.” Plummer patted his shoulder with the back of one meaty hand. “I need to know you’re not setting me up.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “This ain’t America,” Chris stated. “We shouldn’t be scared to talk to each other openly about stuff.”

  “I have a way to bypass the security in the office. The cameras, the sensors, the locks. All of it.”

  “Taya?”

  Rogan nodded, but didn’t say it aloud. “We could break Haskins out and get him out of the city.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “Already taken care of,” Rogan replied. “She’s on her way out of the city.”

  “Where to?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. She said that Haskins would know where to meet her.” That part was a little lie. He was already in open treason territory, but needed to protect Cassandra if he could.

  “You can guarantee that my face, my biometric data, all that shit will be blocked?”

  “Yup. Car tracker, house and neighborhood cameras showing you leaving, city street cameras showing your vehicle driving to the office. All of it.”

  “Okay. I’m in. How do we get him out?”

  “I need to think about it,” Rogan admitted. “It’s not gonna be tonight. Tomorrow night.”

  “Alright.” He took a final pull on the cigarette butt, then dropped it to the rooftop, grinding it under his heel before picking up the remains. “I can see why people start now,” the big man stated. “I feel better already.”

  As they walked back toward the access door, Rogan wondered if he felt better because of the nicotine or that he was going to do something to try to make things right. In the end, it didn’t matter which.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Cassandra guided the car into a truck stop parking lot just south of Waco. She needed to pee so badly, but was worried about the possibility of her Citizen ID getting flagged and telling the agency which way she’d actually gone. Taya and Jason Rogan had gone through a lot of trouble to make it seem like she’d gone south, toward San Antonio and Houston. She didn’t want to foil their plans because she was too dignified to pee in the woods.

  Of course, foiling their plans also meant her arrest, so there was that.

  The car didn’t really need gas, she still had more than three-quarters of a tank, but she decided to fill up anyway. She could wear her mask and pay with cash inside, and go pee while she was at it. While a lot of places didn’t even take cash anymore, she knew that roadside truck stops still did since truckers were a strange bunch. At some point during their conversations, Bodhi had told her that a lot of them didn’t want to register with the government, so they were sort of given a pass as long as they kept their noses clean and didn’t stay in one place too long. She was hoping the relative anonymity afforded to them could also pass along to someone looking to blend in.

  The thought of Bodhi in jail made her heart ache. He’d never been happy with the new System, but this was extreme. How had it gotten to this point? She set her jaw and opened the car door. She was determined to see him again and she’d ask him in person what had happened.

  There was a Highway Patrol officer in line at the register when she went inside, so Cassandra made a beeline for the bathroom first. She’d pay for a fill-up after the cop was gone. She cleaned the seat with a squirt of hand sanitizer and toilet paper, then sat down. God, it felt good to relieve the pressure in her bladder.

  Her cell phone vibrated in her pants pocket by her ankle. She pulled it out and looked at the message.

  Why did you go inside a store! You were told to stay off the grid. Gotta go in and doctor footage and biometrics logs.

  She thought for a moment. Had they told her not to go into any stores? She typed her reply.

  Sorry! Had to use restroom.


  The reply came back immediately.

  DON’T REPLY!!

  Another message followed shortly.

  Replying makes it harder to delete records. CEA pissed that you escaped. Lay low until R contacts you. Take some toilet paper from the bathroom and stay off phone!

  Great, Cassandra thought. Now I’m stealing toilet paper. This was not how she’d imagined her day would turn out. She wondered how Taya had found her so quickly. She had her face covered and had made sure to avoid touching any type of sensor with her hands. The only thing that was uncovered… My eyes, she sighed. Part of the basic biometric database for citizenship was a retinal scan. Taya must have had an alert set up to tell her when passive scanners picked up her biometric information. She’d have to be much more careful in the future and always wear sunglasses if she had to go inside anywhere.

  She unrolled a long length of toilet paper, then folded it over and over several times. By the time she was done, she had a significant amount of toilet paper. She stood and pulled up her yoga pants, wiggling her butt into place inside of them. Then she folded the seam down around her stomach and back and wrapped the toilet paper around herself before flipping the waistline back into place. She could tell the difference, but she was sure nobody else would be able to, especially once her t-shirt was in place.

  She grabbed a pair of cheap, oversized mirrored sunglasses and another bottle of water before walking up to the counter.

  “Citizen ID?” the clerk asked.

  “Oh, um… I’m paying cash, plus twenty in my car on pump three.”

  The clerk looked her up and down once, then nodded. “Okay, sweetie. That’s…twenty-nine forty three.”

  She handed over two twenties and dropped the coins in the tip jar when she got her change. “Thank you, ma’am. You be safe out there and remember, you gotta make sure to move your car every couple of hours or else some people may get suspicious.”